That night the City of Pleasure was illuminated. Eighty thousand tiny electric lamps hanging in festoons from standard to standard lighted the Central Way alone; the façades of all the places of amusement were outlined in fire; the shops glittered; and the cable-cars, as they flashed to and fro, bore the monogram I.C. in electricity on their foreheads. At eight o’clock the thoroughfare was crowded with visitors, and the stream of arrivals was stronger than ever. In the superb restaurants, at all prices (no matter what the price, they were equally superb in decoration), five thousand diners were finishing five thousand dinners, their eyes undisturbed by the presence of advertisements on the walls. The theatre, the music-hall, the circus, the menagerie, the concerts, and the rest of the entertainments, were filling up. In the Amusements Park people shot down railways into water, slid down smooth slopes into mattresses, circled in great wheels, floated in the latest novelties of merry-go-rounds, ascended in the balloon, and practised all the other devices for frittering away eternity, just as though night had not fallen. In the vast court of the Exposition Palace a band was swelling the strains of the newest waltzes to three storeys of loungers and sitters at café-tables, while within the interior of the building men and women wandered about examining the multifarious attractions of the Woman’s Exhibition. But the chief joy was the Oriental Gardens, wherein a multitude of over fifty thousand persons had gathered together. The Oriental Gardens were illuminated, but in a different manner from the Central Way. Chinese lanterns were suspended everywhere in the budding trees, giving the illusion of magic precocious flowers that had blossomed there in a single hour, in all the tints of the rainbow and many others entirely foreign to the rainbow. The bandstand alone was picked out in electricity. It blazed in the centre of the gardens like a giant’s crown, and, although yet empty, it formed the main object of attention. Overhead stretched a dark-blue sky, silvered with stars, and the wind had a warm and caressing quality which encouraged sightseers to expose themselves to it to such an extent that the fifteen cafés of the Oriental Gardens, some sheltered, some quite open, but each a centre of light and laughter, were every one crowded with guests. The four thousand chairs surrounding the bandstand were occupied, and also the six thousand other chairs dispersed in various parts of the gardens. The murmur of conversation, the rustle of dresses, the tinkle of glasses, the rumour of uncountable footsteps, rose on the air. The faces of pretty women could be observed obscurely in the delicious gloom, and the glowing scarlet of cigars bobbed mysteriously about like aspecies of restless glow-worm.